Phrank's Ubuntu Blog

I updated the webpage that displays our home automation status. It shows the last 3 things that have happened, but now the time and temp as well.

I switched out the new P4 system and put up a couple of old PII's to run firefox in fullscreen.
I also switched from windows XP to a small linux distro called DSL - I remastered the ISO so that it would all boot from a CD, so there's no need for a hard drive.

A few things I used:
DSL Linux

R-Kiosk Extension for FF 2.0 to start the browser in fullscreen mode
Ratpoison window manager, via MyDSL - Allows you to position the mouse pointer in the lower right-hand corner of the screen, so you don't see it! - just put 'addhook switchwin banish' in the ~/.ratpoisonrc file
Edited .xinitrc to to turn off the screensaver (xset s off &) and start firefox with the URL to my Home auto server web app
Edited .destop to use ratpoison instead of jwm

It work quite well on the old PII systems - When the power goes out, it won't ruin anything, and it'll start right back up later!

Here's a how-to on remastering the DSL cd:

PXE Network booting allows you to boot a computer over the network.
This means I can install an OS, or run a live cd on a computer that doesn't have a CD-ROM drive or Hard drive.
I can also install Ubuntu without needing to burn a CD every time.

It's pretty sweet.

I'm using Ubuntu Server 8.04 for my PXE server.
A PXE server consists of two things (Same for Windows based OSs):
* A DHCP server that hands out the correct info (In Windows DHCP management it's options 066 & 067)
* A TFTP server that shares the bootable files over the network.